Novel low cost soil moisture sensor

Agriculture is considered a very important economic sector in Brazil. This activity is practiced by farmers in various economic conditions, and the group of small and medium producers the most. Because this class does not have many improvements in investment conditions on their plantations, it ends up having a huge difficulty to grow economically and reach the level of big farmers. This paper seeks an alternative technology to help this disadvantaged sector to have access to measurement instruments at an affordable value, through the development of a soil moisture transmitter. First, a filter has been developed to build the transmitter. Then many tests were performed divided into two steps, tests on water and tests on soil. From the test results, computational tools were used to raise the necessary validation of the curves. Using the coefficient of determination R2 as a technique of regression analysis was reached close to 1, which represents the maximum value if one wants to measure the closeness of two curves, and thus was considered to be a satisfactory result. At the end of the project, has reached the objective of developing a low cost soil moisture transmitter.